In 1967, the novelist John Barth, then teaching at SUNY Buffalo, made an infamous argument for literary experimentation. First delivered as a lecture at the University of Virginia, he warned students and faculty about “the used-upness of certain forms” and “the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities”—by which he meant “the novel, if not narrative literature, generally, if not the printed word altogether.” In the speech, later published in the Atlantic as “The Literature of Exhaustion,” he urged his contemporaries to write with “ironic intent,” to demonstrate they knew what writers had already accomplished, and to create original works of literature by writing about “the difficulty, perhaps the unneccessity, of writing original works of literature.”… Lês fierder